Saturday, July 18, 2015

My husband and I will be going to Disneyland on Monday and Tuesday for my birthday! For those of you that know Disneyland, you know that for hotels there are several surrounding the park that are within walking distance. This is great because you can just walk into the park and you don't have to pay for parking which, as with all things Disney, is severely overpriced. So when I was looking for a hotel a few months ago, naturally I wanted one of these.

Since it's the middle of summer, a huge tourist time, all these hotels were marked up. It is impossible to find one under $100 at this time of year. Just as I was about to book one, it dawned on me . . . how much is parking and how much are hotels outside the walking range? If you're getting a hotel room within walking distance just to not pay parking, that better be the cheapest option.

When I expanded the radius from even just 2 to 3 miles away from Disneyland instead of just 1, there was a dramatic price drop. DUH! Hotels that are within walking distance hugely mark up their price because of the "convenience" of being so close, claiming you don't have to pay the high parking fee. This is what I now like to call The Disneyland Hotel Deception.

Here's the truth. Parking at Disneyland is $17 a day (yes a day!). BUT if you look for a place a little farther away in Anaheim, you can get a discount hotel at prices far lower than a $17 difference in price from the closer hotels. That means even though it sucks paying Disney a crazy amount for parking each day, it's still less than staying in a hotel closer and walking. And it doesn't have to mean getting up that much earlier as we're only talking about a few miles which just adds about a 15 minute driving time. Plus it's less walking! I ended up getting a hotel 7 miles away for $60 a night!

If you really don't want to park, it could still be cheaper to do one of these hotels and use a ridesharing service (see my post Ridesharing). We're definitely going to do this at least for the first day since I have two $5 off Lyft rides, and the estimated price was $5 - $10 a ride so at most we would just be paying $10.

I'm going to think of these things more from now on instead of falling for marketing ploys. I can't believe I hadn't thought of this before! It had just always been a tradition growing up to get one close and walk.